UCLA SMP EdNews, June 2006

by Lisa Manning, SMP Director of Events & Marketing

Planning staff and department meetings no longer needs to be a dreaded task on your school or district calendar. Armed with a few simple techniques and guidelines to make them more productive, meetings can set the stage for building community among your colleagues and accomplishing multiple goals and objectives.

It’s June. Many of us are in the middle of planning our summer vacation, or at least thinking about it. Some of us will use a road map if driving to a distant vacation destination is part of our vacation adventures. As with planning your vacation travels, having a road map as a guide to plan and execute your meeting is critical to its success.

Here are four strategies that can enhance your road map for planning your next meeting.

STRATEGY 1:
Identify what it is you want to accomplish, in what amount of time, and how everyone in attendance can be a part of the conversation.

Let me be the first to offer a public confession . . . I have at one time (well, maybe more than one time) crammed three hours of agenda items into a one-hour time slot. More often than not, those are the meetings where I see nodding heads in the back of the room and unusual displays of stick figure art on attendee agendas.

Before you begin to plan your meeting (or series of meetings), use the Meeting Principles and Strategies Guide to give you focus and avoid the pitfalls of information overload.

Using that guide as your road map, take time to identify the three or four main objectives that you wish to accomplish in the time that you have. Doing so will allow you to discuss agenda items at a deeper level and give attendees an opportunity to contribute. Put into place processes that encourage discussion and interaction amongst everyone in the room.

SMP has used many successful meeting processes, all designed to encourage dialogue and debate. Examples include Wants and Offers, which allows groups to gain a better understanding of what they need from each other in order to meet objectives. Other meetings use the Learning Conversation Principles and Learning Conversation Activity to gain shared understanding around a specific issue. A group process that provides valuable data in a simple and straight-forward fashion is the Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) exercise.

If your agenda includes hot-button issues, or if you have staff or guests new to the group, start with an Icebreaker to set a positive tone or encourage conversation.

STRATEGY 2:
Design an agenda that reflects your objectives, assigns roles, and sets reasonable time limits.

When my family went on summer vacation, it was always the same scenario: Dad drove, Mom navigated, and my siblings and I played "I Spy" to whittle away the travel time. Fortunately, roles and responsibilities were clearly defined from the outset, not leaving much room for argument or decision-making during our journey.

So it can be with your meeting. After you have identified your objectives, begin to draft your meeting agenda. Include your objectives at the top of the agenda and allocate times to each agenda item to set limits for presentation, discussion and next steps. Include the names of colleagues and / or guests who will be facilitating parts of the discussion. Agendas can take on different formats, but all should include key information as seen in this Sample Meeting Agenda Template.

Assign meeting roles of facilitator, recorder, minute-taker, process observer and timekeeper (before or during the meeting) to lighten your responsibilities. When the agenda is finalized, distribute it ahead of time so that attendees come prepared with questions or ideas to contribute.

For those informational items that don’t make the agenda or don’t require discussion, create a separate handout to include with the agenda that attendees can review as their schedules permit.

At a corporate job I once held, building management provided its tenants with a daily sheet of world, national and local news – including the stock report. I could read mine in its entirety as I rode the elevator to my office on the 27th floor. Delegate the design of these updates (weekly, bi-weekly or monthly) to a journalism or English class at your school site as a creative learning project.

STRATEGY 3:
Permanently capture important discussions and decisions.

Before the introduction of digital cameras, most of my vacation photos ended up in a shoebox and forgotten until I found time on a Saturday morning to organize them into an album or put them in a frame for display.

Like my forgotten photos, don’t neglect important ideas and discussions surfaced during your meetings. Immediately capture them using flipcharts, butcher paper, overhead transparencies and / or PowerPoint. Use SMP’s Tips for Quality Charting to guide you.

A unique strategy for those taking notes during meetings: Use a digital camera to capture text written on flipcharts and butcher paper. You can e-mail the photos to the group (and those who couldn't make it) at the conclusion of the meeting and then file them away electronically for future reference. Attendees can then focus on the meeting without the added pressure of taking notes, and you can discard original documents to keep clutter in your office at a minimum.

Visual representation of ideas and discussions are critical to encouraging diverse points of view. Attendees want to know that their ideas are valued and that they are contributing to the task at hand. A favorite SMP strategy for giving meeting attendees an opportunity to express ideas through non-verbal communication is the Chalk Talk Activity.

STRATEGY 4:
End all meetings with a clear understanding of next steps and deadlines.

Before my summer vacation ends, I am already starting to plan the next one. This is my personal coping mechanism for dealing with the end of summer fun and a return to reality.

The conclusion of your meeting should not be the end of the discussion, rather is should be the springboard for action. Attendees must walk away knowing what the next steps are, including personal tasks and responsibilities.

Two effective tools for coordinating next steps are a Gantt Chart and Action Planning Graphic Organizer, which allow you to determine and assign tasks, deadlines and monitor implementation. Another SMP planning tool is the Planning Next Steps Graphic Organizer, which allows the group to focus on one specific issue or task.

Effective meetings also end with a five-minute Plus / Delta session where the group can reflect on what was successful during the meeting and what improvements can be made for the next gathering.

With this road map of strategies and tools, your meetings can be the vehicle to successfully achieving your objectives and goals and building collegiality.

Below are links to websites and books that can provide additional strategies for planning and facilitating meetings:

Heathfield, Susan M. “Effective Meetings Produce Results: Tips for Meeting Management.” About. June 12, 2006.

“Meeting Wizard: Effective Meetings – Tips.” MeetingWizard. June 12, 2006.

Covey, Stephen. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Simon and Schuster: New York, New York. 1989.

McHale, Frances A. Not Another Meeting!: A Practical Guide for Facilitating Effective Meetings. PSI Research, 1999.

Senge, Peter, et al. The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building Learning Organization. Doubleday / Currency, 1994.

West, Edie. The Big Book of Icebreakers: Quick, Fun Activities for Energizing Meetings and Workshops. The McGraw-Hill Companies: New York, New York. 1999.

For this month's topic:

Share with us your own tips for planning a successful meeting. What strategies have you used to ensure that your meeting objectives were met? How did you involve your attendees in discussions and next steps? What would you avoid doing in the future?

We invite you to share your stories. Please click here to email us your responses to this month's Combined Brainpower. We look forward to sharing your thoughts in future issues of EdNews.

We may be very busy, we may be very efficient, but we will also be
truly effective only when we begin with the end in mind.
-- Stephen R. Covey

When I give a lecture, I accept that people look at their watches, but what I do not tolerate is when they look at it and raise it to their ear to find out if it stopped.
-- Marcel Achard

Enrollments are now being accepted for our Summer 2006 Instructional Leadership Institutes. Five different professional development programs are being offered, including:

Critical Friends Groups (CFG) New Coaches
Discover the Power of Advisories!
Classroom Walk-Throughs (CWT)
Using Data for More Than Test Scores
Bridges to Understanding: Teaching That Matters for English Language Learners

Download the event flyer and registration form to sign up today!

In June 2003, Executive Director, Dan Chernow, was invited to Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile as a Visiting Scholar with the objective of helping the University strengthen their graduate programs in education.

is UCLA SMP's Associate Technology Coordinator. Her responsibilities include the 2007 relaunch of SMP's website. Her relevant work experience spans web design, database design and database management. Her experience in the Internet industry includes working as an independent web designer. She has also worked in companies such as NBCi and Edmunds.com. There she served in various roles including analyzing site metrics, performing quality assurance, and creating an online company-wide knowledgebase using Wiki-based collaboration platforms. Prior to entering the Internet industry in 1995, she worked as a Senior Analyst at a real estate redevelopment consulting firm, Keyser Marston Associates and interned at Barton-Aschman Associates, a transportation planning firm where she helped create a GIS for the State of Nevada. She studied History and Urban Planning at UCLA.

Leading Effective Meetings Part II: Building Consensus and Handling Disruptive Behavior

Your Responses to Combined Brainpower

Check Out This Website

UCLA SMP EdNews is published monthly.  If this newsletter was forwarded to you, and you would like to subscribe for yourself, please send an email to the EdNews Administrator with either “HTML” (if you prefer to receive HTML emails -- which look like web pages) or “NO HTML” (if you prefer to receive plain text emails) in the subject line. Likewise, if you are already subscribed, but merely wish to change your HTML or plain text preference, please follow the above protocol. You may also contact the Administrator if you would like to unsubscribe from EdNews, with “REMOVE FROM LIST” in the subject line. Any email requests to the EdNews Administrator not pertaining to subscription issues will be ignored.

If you have questions or comments regarding the content of our newsletter, please direct them to the EdNews Editor.

A nonprofit school reform initiative of the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, the UCLA School Management Program (UCLA SMP) is devoted to the sustainable transformation of public schools into learner-centered organizations where all students can achieve at high levels.

UCLA SMP works with educators, building and district administrators, and community members to improve student achievement by fostering well-managed schools where professional development enhances teacher effectiveness, builds community, and results in personal transformation.

Since the program was launched in 1992, UCLA SMP has worked with over 800 schools in districts throughout California.